Oh please, consumers decide the market. If consumers didn't want services they wouldn't buy it. If consumers wanted "owned" software, businesses would sell enough "owned" software to soak up all that demand. But consumers didn't, and businesses didn't, and so we arrive at today.
Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell. Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix, turns out a portable, maintenance-free, magic email inbox with practically unlimited storage is exactly what people wanted, no coercion needed. They didn't just desperately wish for their hardware and software to have a permanent link to their PC, they went one step further and gave it money and attention.
Maybe I'm completely wrong. Easy way to find out: go make your own broadly successful "owned" software business. Consumers are clamoring for it, aren't they? I'm sure there's plenty of money in selling one-time-fee project management software for customers to own and setup themselves. I mean, who wouldn't want to pay a one-time fee for self-hosted email software that generously provides the "your own friends and family" support package?
> Oh please, consumers decide the market. If consumers didn't want services they wouldn't buy it. If consumers wanted "owned" software, businesses would sell enough "owned" software to soak up all that demand. But consumers didn't, and businesses didn't, and so we arrive at today.
That's false. Consumers don't decide shit. They don't compare things they see to what they could be, they chose from what's available. Add to that the sales and marketing doing their best to hide the true costs of their offerings, and you have what you have today - customers being played like a fiddle, coaxed towards making suboptimal choices.
> Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell.
Spotify was a legal alternative to pirating music, that was one of their bigger selling point.
> Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix
GMail, at least for now, still lets you own the data. The story may change if they ever decide to shut down IMAP access.
> Consumers are clamoring for it, aren't they?
They are, after they get burned a couple of times. See also the reactions to Adobe or Jetbrains going SaaS; the latter actually yielded under pressure and brought back the perpetual licenses.
It's hard to compete with SaaS on price and convenience, because benefits are immediate and true costs are delayed. "Free basic, $9/month advanced" for a shiny-looking product is great at the point of customer acquisition; it's only later on that the customer discovers that the service sucks under any reasonable workload, in one year it costs 1.5x as much, and in 5 years it may just be gone, taking all your data with it.
Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell. Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix, turns out a portable, maintenance-free, magic email inbox with practically unlimited storage is exactly what people wanted, no coercion needed. They didn't just desperately wish for their hardware and software to have a permanent link to their PC, they went one step further and gave it money and attention.
Maybe I'm completely wrong. Easy way to find out: go make your own broadly successful "owned" software business. Consumers are clamoring for it, aren't they? I'm sure there's plenty of money in selling one-time-fee project management software for customers to own and setup themselves. I mean, who wouldn't want to pay a one-time fee for self-hosted email software that generously provides the "your own friends and family" support package?